So about a year ago, I sent a letter to a complete stranger. I was fifty-fifty even then on whether I’d receive a reply at all and I still feel like a bit of a weirdo for having sent it in the first place; by now it was to the point where I’d forgotten I’d even sent the original letter. But in the mail this week I received a reply letter, postmarked Louisville, Kentucky. This is what was in the envelope.

Yes, I wrote a letter to Jennifer Lawrence. Although I have a pretty fair collection of autographed memorabilia (most are books, and most of those are signed by their authors, and most of those are people I either knew already as friends, or was introduced to by friends or family), writing fanmail is not a pastime I make a regular practice of – not only can it be pretty expensive to write letters from Australia to Europe or the US, especially if one would want to receive something back, but in general I don’t have any more admiration for actors, musicians, sportspeople, and other celebrities than I do for any other group of people. Though top-flight actors and sportspeople might get paid ridiculously moreso than virtually anyone else on Earth short of corporate rorting ratfink bigwigs CEOs, they’re just people like any other, doing a job that they’ve trained to do and that they’re paid to do, and my attitude is generally to treat them as such. (Last year, I took a friend visiting from Germany out into the City to have dinner and a beer at an Irish pub I like; while we were in the pub sipping on pints of Guinness – an obligatory first beer for me whenever I visit an Irish pub – my friend all of a sudden recognised a man with a companion at a table behind us, and it turned out the man was Nick Frost, frequent collaborator of Simon Pegg and actor in Shaun of the Dead, Kinky Boots, and Hot Fuzz. And while we were both surprised to see him eating in O’Malley’s on Queen Street, of all places, we made the conscious – and quite easy – decision to just leave him and his companion to enjoy their evening out together. We smiled and nodded at him as we left; that was the sum total of our interaction.) Consequently, I’m not one to go nuts with fanmail.

There have, however, been precisely two occasions in my life where I’ve been moved to write to a celebrity – and more to the point, to someone I didn’t know in person at all – in order to tell them something I felt they deserved to hear, not to approach them as a capital-C-Cᴇʟᴇʙʀɪᴛʏ, but to approach them as a fellow human being who succeeded in touching my life in a small way, just in the same way as I’d leave a friend a note to cheer them up, just as I’d thank someone who picked up something I dropped. The first time was to Delta Goodrem back in 2003, when the news broke that she had been diagnosed with lymphoma. She was 18, and I little more than a year older, at 19; more to the point, though, my grandfather was at that time in the middle of his own long battle with lymphoma as well. The combination of the two was an unsettling first confrontation with the real potential of mortality for the first time in my adult life, and so in an effort to face those grim thoughts head-on, I decided to write a short letter to wish Delta well in her fight. I never sought a reply nor expected one, but several months later an envelope addressed to me, with no stamp and no return address, was dropped in my mailbox. Inside the envelope was a Delta Goodrem postcard, bearing a simple but lovely handwritten message on the back:

Thank you for your letter, and kind thoughts / x D

So that was the only other time. And like the first, the reason I wrote to Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t actually to ask for her autograph. That was a complete afterthought, more or less along the lines of “hell, if I’m going to send a letter to her anyway, I may as well ask if she could sign my copy of Silver Linings Playbook“. I was moved to write to her for another reason entirely, and that was the fact that in the last couple of years, she’s made use of the enormously visible platform she occupies to speak out – more than once – about her experiences with social anxiety. (A couple of articles detailing her opening up about these issues can be found here, and if you read French, here.) As a sufferer of (among other things) a social anxiety disorder myself, and a friend to several others who also struggle with this sometimes debilitating illness, I was almost startled to hear someone speak frankly about their own experiences with anxiety in an open and public forum, and intensely grateful that someone with such influence upon the world’s media was willing to sacrifice her personal privacy in exchange for the betterment of awareness about an issue around which a great deal of stigma still revolves. The same feeling of surprise would have come if it were anyone in the public eye to any degree: a tennis player like Roger Federer, or a royal figure like the Duchess of Cambridge, or even Melissa Downes who reads the Channel Nine news. And so it was that I wrote to Jennifer Lawrence, of all people, to thank her for her forthrightness:

Partly it’s unclear to me why I felt so drawn to write to you, someone I’ve neither met nor seen except on a screen (whether it’s been in your film work, or interviews you’ve given to the broader press). What I do know is that part of my impetus was learning recently from one of your interviews about your confrontation with social anxiety, which hit me in a rather personal way that I wasn’t expecting. Because some unkind people still do stigmatise or minimise anxiety’s impact, as a sufferer myself I’m grateful for your willingness to be honest and open about those issues… though I know that isn’t why you do what you do, I still felt it was important to let you know, and I thought you might like to know, that you’re genuinely inspiring to me as I battle through my own challenges, and I’m sure to many, many others as they battle through theirs.

So I suppose my motive for requesting that she sign the cover of my copy of Silver Linings Playbook was twofold. In one way, the simple fact was that I was writing to her anyway, and I thought that, since I was already paying for postage to the US, it would be nice to have her sign a DVD of the movie for which she won an Academy Award. But the second and more important reason was, I suppose, that to be able to see her signature there – on the front of a movie whose entire plot revolves around the challenges of mental illness, no less – is a reminder of the fact that I was moved to write to her in the first place by her willingness to talk about her own battle; a reminder of someone who’s successfully working through her own anxiety to reach the pinnacle of success in her chosen field; and a reminder that anxiety need be neither invincible nor eternal.